[WikiEN-l] Textbooks (was: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation)

[Anthere]

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Anthere wrote:
> >> The reason why our encyclopedias have to be 
> >>NPOV is because our audience is a  general one. 
> >>The reason why our textbooks have to be DPOV 
> >>is because our audience is very focused (the
> biology 
> >>student, for example) and we need to  bring that 
> >>student through the material in a logical and
> efficient 
> >>way. 
> >
> >No. Wrong. One do not have to throw away 
> >NPOV just for the reason the audience is more 
> >focused. That has nothing to do.
> 
> No - you are totally wrong (stings a bit doesn't it?
> In the future it would be 
> nice if you showed some respect to the opinions of
> others. OK?)

Well, no. Actually, it does not sting. Sorry. I accept
being told I am wrong :-)
As for respect, I had no intention to lack respect to
you. In my mind, saying *here* (on opinion, rather
than facts) "wrong" and "disagreeing" are similar,
except for the fact the second one is tougher to write
:-)
By "wrong" here, I mean "not agreeing". I thought that
was clear. Apologies. All what I will wrote below is
"not agreeing".


> >Logical and efficient is totally compatible with 
> >NPOV. What you suggest is "cutting" very 
> >important information, that students will later 
> >need to make informed decisions. Removing 
> >infos is neither logical nor efficient in the long 
> >term.
> 
> You are confusing a completely liberal education
> with the very real fact that 
> most courses are designed to get students through a
> certain /limited/ set of 
> material as efficiently as possible. In none, not
> one, of my college 
> textbooks on biology is there any serious mention of
> Creationist viewpoints. 
> That is /irrelevant/ information to have in a
> college-level biology textbook.  
> In short; there are /separate/ classes that deal
> with that subject.

It is your opinion that it is not relevant. It is not
everyone opinion. In France, most biology textbooks
introduce good notions of economics and ethics. They
do not restrict themselves entirely to the tech topic.
I am surprised to read that we have a "completely
liberal education" :-)

And in college books, such as in agronomical
textbooks, all these are certainly included, to quite
a length. Because we learn/practice animal/vegetal
manipulations and experimentation that may be
questionable to some people.

I think I know more of american education than you do
about french education.
In short, there are *no* separate classes that deal
with that subject. Teachings are integrated in a
common class. Did you know that ? Our educational
systems are *very* different. And what you call
irrelevant is for us the basics of our education.
American tend to know very well a little bunch of
topics (for which they are very efficient as soon as
they look for a work), while we learn superficially
many different things, and how to learn about them by
ourselves. This is true at least in the type of
schools I went to :-).

Now, I do not know if british system is nearer than
yours, are nearer than ours. I think the question
deserve to be ask.


I don't say your system or our system is better. Both
have benefits and both drawbacks. But please, do
consider that education systems are not "identical" to
american system. And that english textbooks could
maybe be useable by more than american people.

What I say is just that you should not say "it's
irrelevant. Final point."

I think that it is not good to bluntly say it would
"of course" have not to respect NPOV but DPOV. This is
an important point, which must be discussed together.
The outcome does not appear as much obvious to me as
it seems to you.

Also, before any discussion on this topic, I think the
scope of the project should be better defined. Are we
talking of college textbook or are younger students
also considered ? If these are papers after a while,
how are students gonna learn from mere links to an
online encyclopedia ?

Before you say "well, do whatever you want in french,
and less us deal with english matters", I will just
say that potentially textbooks are a wikipedia wide
project. Right now, all wikipedias have a set of
common rules, such as gfdl, neutrality, collaboration.
We agree *together* on all those rules.

If textbook project is gonna be wikipedia wide, but
each language respect very different rules, because no
initial polite discussion was made on the topic, it
will be detrimental to the project, because it won't
be a common proposition.

I don't think any textbook done along your definition
of what is good, would be any good by french education
standards.
I would certainly not support our educational system
to suggest them to students. Because it does not fit
with our principles.

> >> Same thing is true for a section of a medical
> >> textbook on abortion ; we leave out most of the 
> >> history and the different political views on the 
> >> subject and just talk about the procedure itself 
> >> and maybe have a single paragraph at the 
> >> end sating something about access to the 
> >> procedure and that risks doctors  face when 
> >> they choose to specialize in this area. 
> 
> >I disagree with you Mav.
> 
> Now that is a nicer way to disagree. Was that hard?

And I am not sure that here I am the one showing less
respect to another.
 

> >By thus doing, we will only propose technical 
> >books, cold and disincarnated. That is against 
> >what some people consider education is.
> 
> Maybe what /you/ consider to be what education is. 
> You are more than welcome 
> to write liberal education textbooks that treat each
> area taught in a 
> comprehensive, inter-disciplinary way. But don't
> stop other people from 
> making more technically-focused works since that is
> what actually gets used 
> in most college classrooms (at least in the US).  

As I said, you seem to be proposing a fork even before
the project has started. Curious.
Well, maybe is it like the sifter projects with kids
censorships. One project for each country. I think we
will be loosing energy and time if we do that.

 
> Also, most people take /separate/ classes in
> history, science and ethics. So 
> the history of the how an element has been used is
> irrelevant to the 
> chemistry student taking inorganic chemistry; ALL
> that is relevant to that 
> student is is the chemical reactions of the element,
> and its properties and 
> placement in the periodic table (of course a nice
> and short intro on why the 
> element is important would be a good thing to have
> but not vital to the 
> subject matter). The other stuff is optional
> background information that is 
> easily found in the element's encyclopedia article.
> 
> The goal of an encyclopedia is to present a summary
> of the sum total of all 
> human knowledge known about a particular subject.
> The goal of a textbook is 
> to focus on one particular part of that knowledge so
> that students can learn 
> about that aspect in detail. 
> 
> We /already/ have a comprehensive resource in the
> encyclopedia for all the 
> info about a certain element. Let's not confuse
> encyclopedia articles  with 
> textbook entries or otherwise a textbook project
> will not be differentiated 
> enough to exist for long if at all.
> 
> -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

you are right. But making links will have no sense
when textbooks are printed.

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